POLICY SAMPLE

Western Culture

Western culture was born from a historical process of development that distilled what works for humanity and what doesn’t.  It has no racial or ethnic or discriminatory implications.

Democracy can be defined to varying degrees but in essence it is based on the Basic Freedoms, which guarantee free elections, free public discourse, and government by consensus.  Explicit division of powers means a congress or parliament that consists of a Lower House for proposing laws and an Upper House for reviewing laws to protect society from simple majority rule, an independent judiciary that interprets laws in compliance with the Constitution, and an executive branch that implements laws by practical policies.  The West generally operates under this broad definition of democracy, although there are differences in specifics, such as the U.S. being a Constitutional Republic and Australia a Constitutional Monarchy.  The material difference is the head of the executive branch (President) is elected separately from Congress in the U.S., while in Australia the Prime Minister is selected from the winning Parliamentarian party.  How democracy is applied can also differ in terms of simplicity and regularity of public review of policies enacted by the government of the day.  The Swiss system allows for significant Cantonal (state or provincial equivalent) powers including raising own taxes.  The U.S. states have their own recall provisions and referendum (popular, citizen or veto) or initiative.  In essence, they are all attempts at maintaining freedom of political oversight in practical ways by the people over the formation of law and regulations.

Policy Items

• Any ideology that has as its theoretical mainstay a breach of individual liberty by force is unacceptable

• Any ideology that violates private property rights of individual citizens is unacceptable

• Any ideology that breaches any of the Core Values and Basic Freedoms is unacceptable

• A body of thoughts or belief system or teaching paradigm or activism that leads to action against the current Australian polity outside of the democratic process as laid out in the Constitution, is considered inconsistent with the Core Values and illegitimate

• Revamp of all school curriculum to ensure priority teaching of free market liberal democracy governance structure.   

Freedom of Speech and Assembly

There may be some limitations on free speech in the context of contemporary society.  Such limitations should be the barest minimum required to maintain public order and safety against imminent threat, otherwise, free speech is absolute.  For such curtailment to take place, it must be passed by an Act of Parliament and must be short term, with a sunset clause and default expiry date.  Absolute freedom of speech, short of soliciting a “Final Solution” for Australian society, ensures citizens stay on objective debate, not hiding behind sanctioned literature or resorting to legalistic challenges.  Currently, freedom of speech is implied in our system of government.  Although it is practically almost absolute in political discourse, it should be made into a Bill of Rights to be explicit like in the United States, with a concomitant emphasis on law and order with severe penalties for public disorder and physical crimes.

Policy Items

• Enshrining free speech, free assembly and private property rights in official documents and practices, and in education

• Free speech must be made clear for online participation in public debates, with law requiring social media platforms not to control content from the public in any way or form if they are not subject to legal challenges for such content – ie, social media barons cannot have the cake and eat it, and neither can regulators

• Freedom of speech must be absolute in public discourse to protect open society and advancement of fact-based science

• Freedom of speech and assembly can only be temporarily curtailed by an Act of Parliament based on absolute majority vote and with short default time frame in sunset clauses.

Education

Christian principles and Greek Roman thoughts should be taught, not as religion but as foundational values of Western civilisation, including civics, governance and law, and economic and industrial structure.  Young Australians can appreciate the nation’s true background and legacy, not as shown superficially on activist and ideological media.

Marxism, socialism, fascism, caliphate are monolithist ideologies that call for government ownership of all factors of production by a dictatorship.  Advocates of these ideologies always leave out this endgame from their propaganda.  They try to confuse socialism with social policy in democratic capitalist societies.  Social policies are ways for a free society to produce goods that the market doesn’t produce under normal conditions, like national defence and unemployment benefit.  Monolithist ideologies are against Australian culture and the Constitution.  We must not allow disinformation and false history to be used in schools and public institutions to divide Western society or as an excuse for discrimination or intimidation based on psychological conditioning of the people.  Australia must always have the freedom to disagree, argue, grow and develop, against ideologies of suppression or stagnancy.

Policy Items

• Schools and universities should be made to cut back on bureaucracy and administration, which substantially outgrew academic resources per student in the last two-three decades

• Schools should teach the 3Rs with pedagogic value as top priority for funding

• Schools should teach the history of Australian political economy, Western civilisation and basic classical economics, since this is foundational to national development and the positive role that it has played in global socio-economic development

• Foundational courses in Western civilisation must be taught by teachers holding such credentials to avoid moral relativism

• Schools should not embark on current politicised topics on a regular basis where they can create opportunity for teachers to discriminate against students with different views to them

• Australian national anthem should be sung and flag raised at least once a week at a morning assembly in all schools to celebrate Australia’s achievements.

• High performing schools should be able to expand, low performing schools to atrophy if they fail to fix themselves, for the better schools to provide access to parents and students from out of catchment areas.

Meritocracy

The most humane and attractive feature of Western culture is its individual-centric democratic system.  In a free enterprise economy, meritocracy is the natural process whereby individual effort is exerted in pursuit of excellence and achievement of private and public goods.  Discriminatory intervention occurs when we perceive there to be an inherent unfairness that may bias a selection process for reward.  Such intervention can become discriminatory if there is no inherent bias.  It is much safer and more principled to eliminate all forms of discrimination.  The risk of rectifying discrimination becoming originating discrimination is too high with the passage of time.

There is no fairness or reasonableness in society placing quotas or other deterministic outcomes on citizens.  Doing so goes counter to Basic Freedoms and the objective meritocratic process in a free society.  Placing affirmative action on any selection process, in the sense that different standards or lower standards are applied, creates loss of confidence in the selected people, which is debasing them technically and morally.

Policy Items

• All employment conditions and advertising must be based on merit unless approved for a special purpose according to law

• Industry standards and regulations on pay and work conditions should satisfy the merit value

• Abolish all numerical quotas based on any condition other than skill and qualification

• Equal opportunity assistance legislation and programs should have sunset clauses

• Provide practical help for women to work or stay home with young children through taxation and facilities arrangement

• Use voluntary community or industry group help instead of government involvement in support delivery

• Use targeted market-based solutions rather than blanket government intervention and funding

• Aboriginal assistance programs have not worked given their records – hold a wide-ranging Royal Commission on the subject with the purposes of achieving measurable progress in integrating, not differentiating, Aboriginal communities in broader Australian society

• Annual audits on all grants – taxpayer funding should be strictly accounted for.

Productivity

Multi factor productivity (MFP) is highest in a free enterprise system.  Labour, land and capital are brought together and managed to the best ability of market participants to generate the highest return on investment.  This provides wealth and wherewithal to protect the community.  The advent of capitalism was fundamental, gradual and not accidental.  Capitalism is not an “ism” in the tradition of ideologies like Marxism or fascism or religionism, which took human ingenuity to interpret, contort, misperceive reality to conceptualise principles or mandate behaviours that go against human nature.  These ideologies take on too much of the presumption of spiritual religion, like the caliphate that tries to use abstract historical writings to crowbar humanity into a coercive system of governance.

MFP is the product of a free market, where breakthrough concepts and technology come from.  In a properly functioning free market, all economic agents will come up with the right set of factors for MFP at any point in time.  What we should always be concerned about is maintaining the competitive forces in the free market.  Citizens cannot be free without being sovereign consumers in a limited-government economy.  Competition in private supply clears away all the needs for consumers to be vigilant, discernible, knowledgeable about products and services on offer.  A free, competitive market turns the small consumer into royalty.  The moment the supply side becomes constrained, concentrated, market power pricing appears and consumer choice declines, consumer rights get eroded.  Over time, additional laws and regulations generated by the system stifle competition, mainly in supply but also in demand.  They strangle productivity by taking away incentives for individual effort, capital return and economic growth.  Regulatory overreach through by-laws and regulations can lead to state control of production factors and direction, directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly.

Policy Items

• Set reduction targets over 5 years for federal and state budgets to come down to a total cap of 20% of GDP, which cap could only be breached (with a mandated annual review) by a two-third majority vote of Parliament

• Reinvigorate the Productivity Commission and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to regularly review MFP and recommend how to improve it, looking particularly at size and role of government as regulatory constraints and distortions in the free market

• All new laws or by-laws or regulations must be accompanied by cancellation of at least two laws or regulations from the book and carry a sunset clause for expiry

• Use AI extensively in the regulatory approval processes to cut compliance costs, which are making up an inordinate portion of business costs (eg, half of the cost of new housing and of a university degree, and 10-20% of total SME operating costs)

• Freeing up the supply side of industries by raising capacity to bring wholesale and retail prices down for consumers

• Use competitive incentives to make trades training more rapid, using AI and shorter apprenticeships, while maintaining safety and quality of trades

• Focus immigration on value compatibility and supply-side skills in shortage industries

• Lower structural costs by cancelling Government intervention and subsidies in industry

• Cancel all Net-Zero related regulations.

Immigration

As a New World nation, Australia has had a history of immigration to populate the continent and pursue economic development.  Value compatibility should be a key factor in the immigration assessment process. Australia does impose travel visa restrictions on target demographics or geographical areas based on professional assessment by DFAT and Home Affairs, and sometimes the AG Office.  These criteria based on values and culture in determining suitability of migrants who apply for long-term or permanent stay in the country should be applied to all applications.  ASIO and AFP should be part of the determining process.  With strategic onshoring due to geopolitics, industry specific labour force strategy is determining which labour to onshore and which to switch from China to another country for production of traded goods.  Immigration to the West should fall into the categories of very high skilled labour for value added to the tradable sector – like microchips production – and labour for non-tradable sectors in the domestic economy (high or low-skill) in health care, aged care, personal services, construction, building maintenance, hospitality, and the likes.

With AI bearing down on our economy, we need to re-adjust the labour market structure and immigration planning to move with the time.

Policy Items

• Immigration of any category, including refugees under UNHCR sponsorship and programs, should be evaluated on compatibility with Australia’s core values

• Migrant cohort targeting from a value compatibility perspective should be used to select sources of migrants – approval process should depend on ASIO and AFP assessment

• Law and order must be seen to act quickly and decisively without fear or favour, without concerns for political correctness – cultural ghettos should be monitored by government to prevent them from deteriorating into crime ghettos

• Sanctions should be applied promptly to preachers of rejection of, or separation from, Australian values and polity, particularly incitement to violence

• Assist migrant integration using clear secular legislation such as penalties for cultural crimes against individuals

• Close monitoring of the finances and teaching material of all places of worship given their non-profit tax-exempt status, on a regular but sensitive basis

• Objective longitudinal studies of groups of migrants and next generations to find out where integration has failed or succeeded, to develop forward looking immigration policy

• Rapid development and adoption of leading-edge manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence in the West require immigration planning to be revamped to suit skill requirements

• Immigration and student visas should be reduced substantially for two-three years pending review of the housing market and industry needs.  All eyes towards improving the supply-side – eg, foreign student accommodation should lie with the accepting institutions’ responsibility, and migrant accommodation can be looked after by setting the right incentives for new-builds investors in the housing market.

International Trade

Global trade should be based on sustainable improvement in the welfare of all participants. By nature, voluntary exchange is optimal for individual participants who hold the same values.  Trade becomes war when one side tries to use government help to subsidise it for predatory pricing or bully private participants into lowering price.  Rather than improving total welfare, mercantilist and mercenary trade based on opposite value systems creates significant friction and distrust that leads to trade war.  Monolithic regimes operate on a zero-sum game mindset.  Capitalism operates on value-added mindset and voluntary exchange.  Following monolithic ideologies necessitates trade war for own advancement.  Global trade must be based on capitalism to maintain peace.  China’s blind pursuit of excess production and supply through state subsidies, with the effect of destroying trading partners’ sovereign supply chains, has led to a backlash in global markets that is hurting China’s own economy.  Australia’s trade policy should prioritise long-term compatibility of values for itself and trading partners.  Communal values are much more reliable long term than commercial interest.  They should be used to strengthen our sovereign economic strengths in preparation for the certainty of trade turning sour between two opposite value system counterparties.

Policy Items

• Accept the more intense nature of competition between the U.S. and China and frame Australia’s position in that framework, looking at long-term prospects of the two sides

• The E.U. has acquiesced to U.S. trade arrangements by accepting the U.S. nominated tariffs and large-scale import of U.S. energy

• Work with the U.S. to develop a new international forum beyond the United Nations – a United Free Nations (U.F.N.) – to recalibrate free trade internationally for the benefit of all participants who vouch for the same free market open society values

• Trade and defence strategies should go hand in hand on the principle of Peace Through Strength – deterrence is always less costly than actual war

• Use U.F.N. and Peace Through Strength to deter acts of aggression that are set to increase in tempo due to the restructuring of world trade, with the U.S. taking a decisive lead in reorganising the global supply chains

• Lowering our economy’s cost structure through reinforced domestic competition policy should be the top priority for an Australian government in the current settings, acknowledging that the competition bureaucracy will also need monitoring for efficiency.

Defence

The geopolitical landscape has become high risk for Australia as a sovereign nation.  China’s defence spending has grown in double-digit figures for twenty years and has surpassed the combined defence budget of NATO excluding the U.S.  We can play gymnastics with our diplomatic vernacular about the bifurcation of the West and monolithic world, but that won’t help in real terms.  Australia should work with the U.S. to deter China from engaging in kinetic warfare.  The U.S. alliance is indispensable to Australia as we have two continents to protect.  Our national defence should be based on the AAA Strategy:

• American alliance

• Australian continent

• Australian Antarctic Territory

A strong deterrence policy is best at the global and national level.  It is reassuring to see the U.S. shed its pusillanimous stance against the PRC.  The awakening is 10-20 years behind the time, but better late than never.  It was becoming very silly for the West to continue to try to glean behind China’s public utterances about its hegemonic intent for some positive between-the-line meaning, when the regime’s actions have spoken far louder than its words.

A monolithic regime doesn’t change its spots.  It only understands power.  Peace through overwhelming strength is the only option.  By preserving peace, Australia can continue to engage socially and economically with the people of China.  Australia should contribute materially to U.S. and allies’ military positions that will provide forward lines of defence, such as in intercepting Chinese ballistic or other long-range missiles targeting Australia – a missile mesh.   

Policy Items

• Reaffirm U.S. Alliance for deterrence purposes and review comprehensively Australia’s military procurement approaches

• Deterrence via overwhelming military alliances’ capabilities is key to ensuring maintenance of the Western order – military weakness is invitation for monolithists to impose their own global order

• Establish a missile mesh defence shield north of Australia (miss-mesh)

• Strengthening international intelligence sharing and space security

• Seek more U.S. investment in Australia’s logistical infrastructure in the north-west

• Improve coordination between DoD and the private sector to establish nation-wide manufacturing nodes and other supply links to the U.S. supply chain

• Accelerate lease or purchase of first 2-3 Virginia Class submarines under AUKUS, with brought forward target of 12-14 boats in total

• Acquire and develop long-endurance unmanned underwater vehicles and other drone capabilities

• Establish Antarctic Territory supply logistics

• Contract with the private sector to buy coal-to-liquid supplies and build up oil reserves

• Upgrade JORN and other radar systems to extend coverage across the Indo-Pacific

• Coordinate with U.S. and allied countries’ military to provide First and Second Island Chain defence shields against Chinese ballistic missiles targeting Australia

• Raise defence spending to 4% of GDP.

Debt-Zero, Not Net-Zero

Large government intervention in areas other than its core responsibilities will destroy the economy.  Government should not be market participants, it should lead in national defence, domestic law and order, and be umpire to and guardian of private property and free market.

Net-zero is based on the notion of global warming due to carbon emission release from human activity, which is disputed by eminent scientists around the world.  There is no connection between CO2 and temperature, or between temperature and human industrial activity.  Climate Change doesn’t pass muster in science, and mitigation effort without nuclear energy consideration shows up the unseriousness of the Climate Change advocacy movement.  Solar-wind-batteries may have their benefit in particular power supply cases like in remote regions, but they do not help reduce global emissions due to their supply chain impacts.

The cost of Net-zero has doubled and tripled electricity prices in Australia over the last decade, putting enormous strain on our manufacturing sector.  Net-zero places a $100,000 burden per taxpayer over 15 years, in return for purely speculative gains.  Priorities are misplaced in transiting our energy supply system to a high-cost one.  Part of that misplaced transition has led to our increasing dependence on the China supply chain, which is based on fossil fuel power generation, worsening global emission.

To truly help the environment, we should focus environmental strategy on science, technology and adaptation, and the private sector without government subsidies and distortions.  Immediate savings from this switch from Net-zero to Debt-zero will enable Australia to boost spending on defence and other core functions of government, while reducing budget deficits and the national debt.

Policy Items

• Cancel Net-zero policy and targets because the U.S., China and India are not parties to the Paris Agreement in name or in fact

• Cancel all measurement programs and subsidy programs under Net-zero policy

• Approach Climate Change as a potential and manageable risk like any other facing the country, not an Armageddon that is reprogrammed and re-propagandised every decade like a broken record with no impact except for causing our economy’s cost structure to surge to unmanageable levels

• Pursue an adaptive strategy to minimise any potential cost of lowering pollution

• Focus on cutting the national debt to minimise intergenerational damage

• Incentivise through tax breaks the private sector to contribute to visible environmental programs like ocean clean-ups and elimination of harmful elements in the food and water industries (eg, microplastics in recyclables)

• Simplify and reduce as much as possible environmental regulation on the supply side of industries such as construction and land use, keeping only the core requirements and with specific time for redress.

Energy Supply

Energy supply is the top priority for nations in the race for AI dominance or survival.  Much of the world has had a long prosperous and peaceful time for self-indulgence under the U.S. military umbrella that governed Bretton Woods.  It’s time to wake up to new realities.   Australia’s energy policy should be horses for courses, using an optimal mix of fuels and generation technologies that engender the most reliable quality of supply at the lowest cost depending on circumstances.  Australia has an abundance of energy resources which we readily export to the rest of the world yet has policies that deprive Australians of such endowments.  Our electricity price is three times that of China, preventing any strategy on onshoring industry and manufacturing.  We are handing over our electricity supply system to China, which manufactures solar and wind plant and equipment using coal, gas and oil.  China is the most intensive CO2 emitter in the world.

The moratorium on nuclear energy must be lifted so that the market could have choice of proven reliable and low emission technologies.  The Western world is moving fast in installing new nuclear energy capacity to meet clean energy targets and AI demand for power.

Policy Items

• Terminate Government intervention in funding project types – it’s not fair to make police and nurses pay for commercial investors’ forays.

• Cancel blanket subsidy programs for all forms of power generation

• Targeted assistance to solar-wind-battery combination on a project basis only if there is specific strong public benefit evidence – such as for a remote region

• Lift the moratorium on nuclear energy so the market can select the best energy generation

• Extend life of existing gas and coal fired power stations to bridge the time needed for mass entry of nuclear energy

• Cut most of the budget for Clean Energy Finance Corp and Australian Renewable Energy Agency, merge these two bodies into one Best Value Energy Agency and redirect funding to researching least-cost energy supply including nuclear energy deployment

• Establish nuclear energy fission and fusion curricula in universities and high schools

• Leverage Competition Policy to privatise remaining state-owned utilities

• Review operational processes and requirements of all energy supply utilities, private or public, to ensure cyberwarfare is not able to be deployed against Australia’s power infrastructure

• Establish contingency power supply procedures in case of cyberattacks on power supply infrastructure

• Rewrite AEMO rule book to eliminate discriminatory rules and regulations to let the market work out the best way to reduce emissions considered dangerous by regulators.

Health

Australia’s social welfare system is being turned into a vote buying contest by government.  Reminiscent of our public education system, there is a class of administrative operators in public hospitals that exist for the purpose of keeping the institutions ideologically loyal.  NDIS has gone from “fully costed” $1 billion 10 years ago to $50 billion today and still counting.  This is clearly wasteful and unsustainable.

Policy Items

• Commission the Productivity Commission to undertake a broad review of NDIS from a strategic perspective, not as a tactical health program that pays little attention to budget rationale or sustainability.

• Privatise the NDIS, turn the scheme into a user-pays system whereby payment for insurance cover is appropriately calculated based on set premiums paid by taxpayers for the scheme.  Cover (benefit) payments direct to patients, not case managers.  The scheme must be costed and paid the same as a private scheme, with eligibility to be determined by the private insurer(s).  If it is unsustainable as a private scheme, it is unsustainable as a public scheme.

• The number of patients / participants to the scheme is the same as the total pool of unemployed Australians so culling this number to get to the real people in need is first-order priority.  The exponential growth in the administrative state is replicated in every area of our health system, including front line hospitals.  This unproductive cost must be cut to genuinely target patient needs.

Taxation

Limited government is the antidote to corruption and waste, and the best protector of human rights and the free market system.  Current bloated government size and excessive spending are cutting productivity by giving poor incentives to workers to work less and receive freebies from government.   A government that cannot provide adequate leadership with 20% of GDP spending will not be able to do anything with higher tax revenue.  It can only harm the country.  Focus should be on paying off the national debt and deregulating the economy to help small medium enterprises.  The destruction of small business in Victoria is taking that state to bankruptcy again, not learning from and disregarding the debacle of the late 1980s.

Policy Items

• Simplify the Tax Law – avoid spending 90% of public resources chasing the last 10% of tax dues that may be subject to unreasonable tax regulations as leftover from the past

• Index personal income tax thresholds to avoid bracket creeps

• Total recurrent all-Government spending and tax revenue should be brought down and capped at 20% of GDP (target over 5 years, ie 2% of GDP real tax reduction pa, starting from the current >30% of GDP)

• This budget rebalancing towards zero deficit-spending to release State capacity to bring down the national debt

• The tax revenue cap should include interest payment on the national debt

• All discretionary spending by Government should be subject to half-yearly review by Parliament and enforced through an Act

• The Federal budget should be used to steer State budgets towards the whole-of-Government target through the fiscal equalisation arrangement

• Only under national emergency such as a declaration of war can Parliament raise the cap limit on an annual-review basis

• Terminate all tax breaks for any Net-zero or Green Energy programs and all subsidies embedded in mandatory renewable energy or emission reduction certificates

• Terminate all mandated CO2 measurement programs

• Productivity Commission to review and cut all State funding to NGOs on a timeline

• Require universities, hospitals and other public bodies to cut administrative positions not directly related to core services provision, eg, academia and medical capacity

• Privatise the ABC, SBS and sell all State shareholding in Qantas and any publicly listed or private enterprises and use the proceeds to pay down the national debt

• Convert as much international bond debt to domestic as practically possible, by issuing index-linked Commonwealth bonds to Australian residents to keep interest payment at home.

Reform

The last major economic reforms in Australia, on a bipartisan basis, were several decades ago, leading Australia to a record-breaking 30 years of uninterrupted economic growth.  But the past 15-20 years have seen our political economy sustaining increasing regulatory and interventionist actions by successive governments.

All reforms should be focused on resetting the public sector to allow the economy to expand for the benefit of all rather than just supporting the unproductive portion of the public service; taking down interventionist regulations and policy; expanding competition and accelerating supply capacity in industry and commerce.  Reform in key industries like the financial and banking sector is critical to improving Australia’s economic growth while decreasing public sector liabilities.